Flood

23

Helen Gray and Michael Thurley took a late breakfast in the IAEA trailer they shared.

Then, still early in the morning, they prepared to take Piers’s conference call. They installed themselves in a bar close to the waterfront of Bushehr’s old port, and set up their laptops on a plastic table. The computers were battered relics of the noughties, all the International Atomic Energy Agency could afford. The heat was already gathering. But the open-fronted bar was used to western visitors, and was equipped with fans and plenty of iced water, and would be bearable for an hour or more yet.

While they waited for Lily to log on Helen sipped orange juice, and looked out at the Persian Gulf.

Bushehr was at the end of a long, flat island, once joined to the Iranian mainland by a tidal marsh; now it was cut off by the rising sea, and you got here by boat or aircraft. A battered cargo ship made its way toward the deep outer anchorage, probably stuffed with the dried fruits and raw cotton that were the principal exports of the region. Its gray form passed between rows of buildings. Looking inland Helen could make out the industrial hinterland of the old city, the food-processing and engineering facilities attracted here to serve the regional oil distribution center that was the town’s main function. There was a smell of spices, of oil, of hot metal, of thick coffee from inside the bar, and a muezzin call floated on the hot morning air.

And there, like a pale mushroom rising above the old port, was the containment dome of the nuclear power plant, the reason they had come here.

The laptop screens lit up. There was Lily sitting in what looked like a hotel room, and Amanda, her sister, in the cramped confines of a caravan or a mobile home. These were just still images. They had to wait a few more seconds for the links to be fully established; bandwidth wasn’t what it used to be. Helen and Michael had never met Amanda, but had got to know her online through Lily, like a member of an extended family.

Helen murmured to Michael Thurley, “So this is it. No Gary, no Piers-even though Piers is supposed to have set up this online reunion in the first place.”

Michael said, “Well, Gary’s at the bottom of the bloody sea somewhere, so you can’t blame him. But as you say, Piers set it up. You’d think he could find half an hour to speak to us.”

“He did it for Lily. That’s what he says.”

“Surely for himself too.” Michael rubbed an unshaven chin. “I was brought up a Catholic, you know.” Actually she hadn’t known that about him. “We were quite a tight community, we Hampshire Catholics. Not many of us, for one thing. I lapsed at a young age, seventeen or so.” He smiled. “Not everybody in the church was as tolerant of my homosexuality, my ‘sin,’ as they might have been. But my mother continued to practice.

“A few years later my father died suddenly, and my mother said she had lost her faith. She stopped attending Mass. I found it rather upsetting. Although I had no intention of going back myself, I found it somehow comforting that she continued to practice. As if I had a route back. Well, she did go back for my sake, she made her confession and that was that. A good thing too. I think she found the church a comfort in the years before she died.”

“So maybe Piers is the same, you think. He won’t meet us, but it’s comforting for him to know that the rest of us still do.”

“Perhaps. But do any of us really understand each other? Why, I don’t even understand us.”

And nor did Helen, though she had had to try to explain her relationship with Michael to the IAEA inspectors and nuclear engineers, western, Russian and Iranian, who regularly hit on her. She was a single mother, Michael a homosexual in early middle age, and they were locked in a peculiar relationship: sexless, passionless-but not really platonic, it was more than that. They had come together in the trauma of the London flood, of course. Maybe they had found in each other something they needed, something each had lacked separately.

Or maybe, on some deeper, more cynical level, all she really cared about Michael was that he still represented the best chance she had of getting her child back.

Lily’s image jerked to life. “Are we on? Howdy from Texas.”

Amanda smiled, her face lighting up, and blew kisses.“Hello Bushehr, here are the votes from the Luxembourg jury.”

Helen and Michael waved back, feeling foolish, sitting in this empty bar waving at aging laptop screens.

They quickly established where and when they were: Lily in her hotel room in Houston at midnight, Amanda in a caravan in the Chilterns, not far from Aylesbury, where it was very early morning,“sitting on a hillside with a bunch of sheep and half the population of Chiswick,” and here were Helen and Michael outside an Iranian nuclear plant, some thousand kilometers south of Tehran.

Amanda said,“I don’t really understand why you’re there. Aren’t you looking for your baby, Helen? His father was Saudi, not Iranian. And I don’t know what you have to do with nuclear reactors…”

It was a complicated story. This reactor, built under contract by Russian engineers, was not long ago a pricking-point of world tension as a pivotal point of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But Bushehr sat right on the Persian Gulf, and, like more than four hundred of the world’s nuclear facilities, was threatened by the rising sea. Not only that it was a lousy piece of engineering, full of design flaws eradicated from most plants since Three Mile Island. The IAEA team were rushing to work with the Iranians to decommission it before the sea had a chance to overwhelm it.

“Naturally HMG is supporting that effort,” Michael said.“I managed to get myself assigned to our small diplomatic team. All an excuse to stay close to the trail of baby Grace, you see.”

Grace had disappeared into the complicated clutches of Said’s branch of the Saudi royal family. One patriarchal figure in that branch, however, a distant cousin of the Saudi king, was more of a realist than the rest, and had appeared to offer compromises. This man had been swept up by the global crisis, as had everybody else, and had been sent to Iran as part of a Saudi inspection party. The Saudis needed a presence here because any fallout from Bushehr would have threatened the whole of the Gulf downwind, including Kuwait, Dubai and Saudi itself.

Michael had got himself attached to this mission in the hope of making contact with this helpful Saudi prince. “But progress is slow,” he admitted.

Helen thought that was an understatement.

Amanda shifted in her chair. “Well, we couldn’t get much further from the coast, and just as well. There’s something I want to show you.” She tapped at an out-of-shot keyboard. “I’ll see if I can download it. It’s a map they published yesterday. I wish Benj was up, he’s the one who’s good at this stuff, but he won’t be awake for another six hours minimum… Here we are.”

Down came an image of Great Britain, as the country had been transformed by the flooding, a composite of hundreds of satellite photographs. Helen quickly found that it was interactive; you could touch the screen and it would allow you to zoom and pan, and overlay town names and roads. They played with this for a while, discussing what they saw.

The map was strikingly different. The Thames estuary had broadened to a bay that swamped the marshes of Essex and North Kent. The beaches of the south coast resorts had vanished. In Somerset the sea had swamped the marshes and peat moors, and lapped around Glastonbury Tor. In East Anglia the Fens’ ancient drainage systems had been overwhelmed, and the sea had pushed inland for sixty kilometers or more, through Peterborough to form a new shore at Cambridge. In the north the Humber estuary now snaked into an inland sea that covered what had been low-lying Yorkshire farmland. In the west the Lancashire coastline from Liverpool up to Lancaster was submerged; the city of Liverpool itself had been all but abandoned.

Helen felt oddly dislocated. Her years in Barcelona had jolted her out of her lifelong habit of taking in information through screens. She had to remind herself that this was real, that the sea really was taking these big bites out of Britain, that this was the changing country Grace would come home to, someday.

Amanda was talking of her life in the caravan park. Even now, though the worst of last year’s storm-driven London floods had receded, the resources hadn’t been found to repair the abandoned housing stock in Fulham and Chiswick and Hammersmith and elsewhere. “These caravans are putting down roots. We’ve got mains, electricity and water! But it drives me crazy, it’s so small, I don’t have three quarters of my stuff…” Helen sensed that under her sparky talk Amanda found the thought that she might never be allowed back home, never able to rebuild and repair, disturbing on some fundamental level.

In the meantime life in Britain was changing in more subtle ways. Transport was more difficult, with washed-out road and rail links and the steadily increasing cost of fuel, and this was forcing a profound adjustment on everybody. Amanda’s kids were going to local Buckinghamshire schools, crowded with London refugees who were picked on by the locals. Amanda still commuted daily into her job in London, but she made the last leg on a riverboat that sailed past drowned river-front flats. She did her shopping in a Waitrose or a Tesco’s in Aylesbury, going in and out by bus, but what you could buy in the supermarkets changed daily as their supply and distribution chains broke down. Small independent stores were making a comeback, in fact, boasting fresh local sources.

“Everything is sort of stretched out of shape,” Amanda said stoically. “I sometimes think it’s as if we’re regressing to the past. Local schools, jobs, food. But things are still working, just.”

Lily sympathized about the caravan. “I can imagine you and the kids crammed in there. I expect I’ll have more room in Gary’s submarine.”

The talk turned to that, the nature of the dive, the dangers, its purposes.

Lily said, “Gary, Thandie and their crew simply don’t believe the UN’s assurances about the limits to the sea-level rise.”

Amanda snorted. “Never mind the scientists. Just ask Benj and Kristie. There’s endless online chatter about it all. You have Aussie kids who watched Bondi Beach disappear, Inuit kids watching the permafrost drown in the Arctic-and a lot of them measuring what’s going on in some way, even if it’s only chalk marks on a pier. Kristie’s keeping up her scrapbook of this stuff-do you remember that project, Lily? I mean they’re all just kids, but kids aren’t necessarily stupid, my kids certainly aren’t, and they’re telling each other what they see. And they all agree that the rise is real, and in fact it’s accelerating. So, Lily, you don’t need to go diving at all. Not unless it’s just an excuse to get up close and personal with that astronaut.”

“Gordo, you mean-”

“That’s what I’ve been telling her too,” came a new voice.

In her screen image, Lily looked up, startled. “Oh, hi, Piers.” Helen saw Lily shove sideways to let him sit beside her; they seemed to be on the edge of her hotel room bed.

Helen and Michael exchanged a glance. So Piers had made it after all.

“Looking good, Piers,” Helen said. “Texas cooking agrees with you.”

Piers smiled, but it was a strained expression, and his eyes looked dark. Helen remembered it was past midnight for him, and he’d clearly been working hard. He turned to Lily. ‘Gordo.’ You name-dropper.”

“He’s taking me on a personal tour of Johnson tomorrow. How cool is that?”

“Well, it’s good that you should see the space center before it becomes a museum.”

Piers’s tone startled Helen. He was right, of course. Despite heroic efforts Cape Canaveral was under severe threat; from space Florida looked as if it had been cut in half by the ocean. But the remark was cynical for Piers, and personal, even cruel. One of the many secrets they had learned about Lily in Barcelona was that Lily had joined the USAF, despite being raised in Britain, in the faint hope of making it into NASA; this was an old dream for her, now flung back at her by Piers. Perhaps he was tired. Or, just maybe, there was some small grain of jealousy lodged in his soul.

Lily, however, didn’t react.

Piers said now, “Just a minute.” He reached forward and tapped at an invisible keyboard.

The laptop images blinked, then recovered, but the picture quality was poorer, the sound scratchier.

Amanda asked, “What was that? Something on the fritz?”

“No. I put us through a military encryption filter; we’re reasonably secure now. Look, I overheard the last bit of your talk. I want to give you some advice, all of you. This theorizing about the sea-level rise is actually irrelevant. Whatever happens to the ocean, in future things are likely to get a good deal more difficult.”

“ ‘Difficult,’ ” said Michael.

“Yes, difficult. I talked over some of the bigger picture with Lily earlier. We’re already seeing petty wars triggered by refugee flows and shortages of fresh water and dry land, new pressures exacerbating old tensions. At present it’s the usual flashpoints that are kicking off, India versus Pakistan for instance-though that conflict’s largely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the deltas. But nowhere will be immune, ultimately.”

His dry, laconic way of speaking was oddly chilling. Helen wondered what briefings might lie behind his words. “So what’s your advice, Piers?”

“To go home. Back to Britain, as soon as you can. Look-Britain is under pressure, from the loss of farmland, the flooding of London and the other cities. And we’re still heavily reliant on imported food and energy sources. But the fact is Britain is an island, and that gives us a certain natural security. It always has. The government is beginning a crash program of resilience, of securing food and energy supplies without a reliance on foreign imports-I mean, we have coal, North Sea gas and oil, nuclear. Even in some of the worst-case climate change scenarios Britain fares reasonably well. A Gulf Stream collapse, a cooling of the north Atlantic, might be balanced by a general warming of the Arctic.”

“We should retreat to Fortress Britain,” Lily said. “While the rest of the world drowns.”

“Well, just think about it. You did want us to stick together, Lily. What else can I do but give you my best advice?”

Lily said,“I appreciate it, Piers, but you’re not going to put me off my dives. There’s no scientific consensus about the sea-level rise. Don’t you think it’s worth a few submarine jaunts to try and find out?”

“The correct question is, is it worth losing your life?” He looked at her steadily. “I’m actually concerned for your safety, Lily, believe it or not.”

She reached across and grabbed his hand. “I know. But I have to go. Because if I don’t, who’s going to look after Gary?”

He laughed. Then he pulled his hand away, withdrawing into himself again. He stood up. “I need to get back to work.”

Helen frowned. “You can’t be serious. You’re exhausted.”

Piers smiled, ducking so the others could see his face in their screens. “I’m fine. Good night, all.”

“Good night and good morning, Piers,” Amanda said.

When he’d gone, Michael shook his head. “He’s wearing shorts and no tie, but nothing has changed about him. I’ve said it since the first time I met him. One of these days that man is going to snap like a dried twig.”

Lily snorted, and stretched.“Well, he’s not talking me out of my submarine trip. And I’m not done chatting yet, the night is young. What say we have a coffee break? I’ll see if I can get this lousy military filter off the link.”

They agreed, and broke up. Lily filled the screens with a silly saver image, some relic of her childhood perhaps, a puppet aqua-girl with long blond hair and webbed feet who swam past to a soppy crooning song.

But Helen’s phone sounded with a news flash. A nuclear warhead being hastily moved from a flood-threatened missile facility on the north German plain had been involved in a high-speed vehicle pileup. The warhead had partially detonated; Hamburg had been declared a disaster zone, and the German government was appealing for aid.